Our team has joined RIM’s global organization and will continue to bring our expertise in BlackBerry® application development and real-time content delivery to the BlackBerry platform. The Viigo for BlackBerry app will also continue to be available for download through BlackBerry App World™.

To the Viigo Team – a very special thanks to all of you for helping to build such an exciting product, and a wonderful company. We’ve arrived at this point today because of you.

Mark Ruddock
CEO Viigo

“With the growth of mobile Internet usage and the need for real-time financial and business news content, we are pleased to provide our members with the additional value of adding this important channel to our distribution network,” said Laura Sturaitis, Business Wire Senior Vice President, Media Services and Product Strategy.

Business Wire’s co-branded versions of Viigo allow users to access Business Wire content categorized by industry, language, subject and multimedia news. Additionally, the application features direct links to Business Wire’s Twitter feeds (@BusinessWire, @EONpr, @TradeshowNews, @ExpertSource and @BWPolitics), YouTube channel and the RSS feed for the All Things Press Release podcast series.

Users will also have access to other Viigo modules for real-time weather, sports scores, financial information, social networks and more. To download the Business Wire/Viigo mobile app, visit http://www.viigo.com/partner/businesswire.

“The fundamental premise of Viigo is that it provides users with immediate access to the information they believe to be of interest anytime and anywhere,” said Mark Ruddock, CEO, Viigo. “Our partnership with Business Wire now allows Viigo to deliver news literally as it breaks.”

Business Wire, a Berkshire Hathaway company, is utilized by tens of thousands of member companies and organizations worldwide to functionally enhance and communicate investor relations and public relations content to target audiences. As a recognized disclosure vehicle in the United States, Canada, the UK, France, Germany and other EU markets, Business Wire facilitates the simultaneous flow of market-moving press releases from corporations to financial markets and their audiences, including regulatory authorities, media, investors, financial information systems and consumer news services. Business Wire also handles XBRL tagging, document formatting and regulatory filing into the EDGAR and SEDAR systems.

Communications professionals turn to Business Wire to optimize and issue press releases, photos and multimedia to news organizations, journalists, trade publications, search engines, and individuals, with full-text posting to web sites, online services and databases. A range of distribution options enables members to target by geography, industry, news theme and audience demographics.

Founded in 1961, Business Wire has dual headquarters in San Francisco and New York, with 30 bureaus in cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Miami, Paris, Frankfurt, London, Brussels, Tokyo, Toronto and Sydney and reciprocal offices throughout the world. Business Wire’s patented NX data platform supports XML, XHTML and XBRL code that enhances news release interactivity, social media sharing and search engine optimization. More information about Business Wire and its services is located on its website at www.BusinessWire.com.

Team Viigo
News, literally as it breaks.

“In season, we need to equip our sales force with tools that make it easy to support our retail customers,” said Sherrie Foster, manager, Marketing Programs, at The Scotts Company. “Viigo had the tools to easily and securely give our field sales force access to product information on their Blackberry Smartphones. They get the needed information wherever they are.”

To facilitate the distribution and management of the application across the enterprise, Viigo is integrated with Scotts in house BES infrastructure and IT structure. As a result of this integration, Viigo can automatically be provisioned to any required Blackberry Smartphone with a single click.

“We’re excited to have been selected by Scotts to help power their remote sales force,” said Mark Ruddock “Making critical corporate information assets available on smartphones is an important component in driving the enhanced productivity and effectiveness of front-line workers. Viigo’s at the forefront of this movement.”

Team Viigo
We even help make the grass a little greener

“Viigo is continuing to gain significant traction with carriers around the world,” said Mark Ruddock, CEO, Viigo. “our partnership with Telkomsel provides further evidence of the value we offer and the support we are gaining at the end user level.”

Telkomsel Vice President of Product Lifecycle Management Rachel Goh said, “We believe it is important to continue introducing new services to our customers in order to provide the best solution for their mobile lifestyle activities. Now we deliver Viigo to our BlackBerry customers so they can enjoy an easy to use yet customizable service to tailor their experience and access a wide range of information as required throughout the day.”

As a co-branded version, Telkomsel will offer customized content including local news feeds, blogs, weather and more.

Team Viigo
Everywhere!

“In our first decade in business we have focused on introducing innovation and quality to provide our customers with the best possible mobile experience,” said Rogerio Takayanagi, Chief Marketing Officer for TIM Brasil. “Viigo embodies these same characteristics making it an excellent choice for us to include as a default application on all our BlackBerry devices.”

The Company has a national reach to approximately 93% of the urban population and offers services to mobile and fixed telephony, data transmission and high speed Internet access, providing the convergence of services for its customers.

The Viigo application offered by TIM Brasil features Brazilian content, a custom channel library, and supports the Brazilian Portuguese language. This is in addition to the standard customizable news feeds, weather reports, sports information, financial intelligence, the facility to make purchases, participate in social networks, read books, track their flights and more that has made Viigo one of the most recognized applications for BlackBerry smartphones.

“Viigo is continuing to gain significant international presence through the partnerships we have developed with carriers around the world,” said Mark Ruddock, CEO, Viigo. “We are pleased to be working with TIM Brasil and supporting their initiative to provide their customers with the best smartphone experience possible.”

Team Viigo
Olá mundo

UBS elected to make Viigo available to all corporate BlackBerry smartphones in an effort to ensure its employees have real time access to the critical news and information that might impact their day, wherever they are.

In addition to customized content, UBS users will be given access to the wide range of additional features offered by Viigo including audio podcasts, stock quotes, currency exchange rates, flight searches & status, restaurant bookings and weather. The range of functionality offered by Viigo is anticipated to dramatically increase the value the firm derives from its existing BlackBerry deployment.

“Having Viigo Enterprise selected by UBS for such a broad based deployment is an exciting achievement,” said Mark Ruddock, CEO, Viigo. “For the past year, Viigo has been working hard on a powerful range of enterprise features that deliver a compelling value proposition to businesses, including the ability to rapidly distribute a wide range of internal and external information securely to their mobile workforce with little or no additional investment.”

Find out what we can do for you … contact sales@viigo.com.

Team Viigo
Information Equals Advantage

The application, which is driven by OppenheimerFunds’ intranet content, provides OppenheimerFunds’ workforce with mobile access to OppenhiemerFunds’ fund performance and rankings, fund updates, manager and team updates, news, corporate communications, fulfillment and more.

“With the adoption of Viigo, OppenheimerFunds has made gaining access to our information easier and more readily available for our staff using their corporate BlackBerry smartphones,” said Lucy Zachman, VP, Director of Customer Experience and Creative, eBusiness, OppenheimerFunds. “Viigo demonstrated a unique ability to support the requirements we had set out and proved to be an excellent partner to work with.”

Viigo has been integrated with OppenheimerFunds’ in house BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) infrastructure and backend content management systems. Benefits to this include the ability to leverage the end-to-end security provided by the BES and the facilitation of distribution and management of the application across the enterprise. As a result of this integration, access to corporate data is now delivered in a compelling manner on mobile devices.

OppenheimerFunds, Inc. is one of the nation’s largest and most respected investment management companies. The Oppenheimer funds managed by OppenheimerFunds, Inc. and a subsidiary have nearly 6 million shareholder accounts.

Team Viigo
What’s Powering Your Organization?

In 2009, millions of you downloaded Viigo for the first time … in fact, this year alone, we experienced more than 3 times the number of downloads than we’d seen cumulatively across the entire 4 year lifetime of the company.

Once people started to play with Viigo, they dove right in, driving well over 1 billion impressions across hundreds of thousands of discrete feeds (a great example of the phenomenon of the long tail).

Our servers seemed constantly under ever increasing pressure, but held up very well thanks to the foresight and hard work of our Server team. In fact, our new server architecture, which was rolled out recently and which will power all future clients, will help us deliver significantly more users per unit of infrastructure than ever before, in addition to delivering much faster overall performance. This is important as we expect growth to continue to accelerate in 2010 as rates of smartphone adoption increase, as additional partners pre-load Viigo on their devices, and as we expand to new smartphone platforms for the first time.

I am happy to say that downloads and user activity haven’t been the only bright spots however. We delivered record year over year revenue growth this year, and that growth continued to accelerate towards the end of the year thanks to a record month in December and a record quarter in Q4 across all measures (record bookings, record advertising revenue, record eCPM rates and most exciting perhaps, record enterprise revenue).

What’s in store for 2010? Well, it all starts with a fundamental focus on the product. As many of you have noticed, we’ve had fewer product and service releases recently (down from the blistering pace set early in the year by our Handset and Services teams). This is quite deliberate. Based on your feedback, we knew we had lots of work to do. Furthermore, as we looked at the rapid changes occurring in the smartphone marketplace we decided it was time to make some fundamental changes to our product architecture in order to provide us with a winning platform for the future. In fact, over the past few months, we’ve had a number of important R&D projects underway that will help to change the face of Viigo as you know it.

We promise you that the wait will be worthwhile … our target is for lighter weight, faster clients … augmented by new server-side intelligence … delivered across a wider variety of smartphone platforms … and all designed to provide you with the best way of discovering and consuming content on mobile devices.

Of course none of this happens without the wonderful team here at Viigo … and my profound thanks goes out to them for all their hard work. They’re an amazing group of people to work with.

Wishing you a Happy and Prosperous New Year!

Mark Ruddock
CEO Viigo

p.s. I’m happy to connect on Twitter any time … you can find me at @RuddockMH … corporate announcements can be found at @Viigo

Select Basketball (or Hockey).

Select Stats.  Then you’ll see a huge list of statistics that will surely interest you… points, assists, rebounds etc.  Select as many as you’d like (by clicking on them), and when you’re finished, click ‘back’.

Head back into your Sports module where you’ll see all of your new subscriptions.

Team Viigo
Know Everything!

This debugging flag makes Viigo send out emails to our testing team when certain things happen in the application that may require developers attention (e.g. certain exceptions or problems reaching the Viigo servers). The impact on you as a Viigo user is that you may see some strange email messages generated by Viigo in your outbox. You would have also seen a strange dialog box when you first ran Viigo that said something like “This is a test build: Do Not Distribute”

We apologize for this mistake, and are now in the process of creating a fixed build and uploading it to BlackBerry App World. You should get a notification in App World when the new build is available.

Team Viigo

This holiday season Team Viigo has compiled a list of useful resources that we hope will provide you with inspiration and enliven your holiday spirit.

“The Holiday Season” is a new OPML that you can find at the bottom of our News and RSS channel library (click menu > add channel).

In it you’ll see some cool RSS essentials for the Holidays… Decorating Ideas, Gift Ideas, Party Tips, Holiday Survival, Travel, Food, Beverage, Giving Back, and Holiday Entertainment.

It’s very easy to subscribe to any of these feeds.  Simply browse through our lists of content, and when something catches your eye… “just click it.”

Lastly, if you have any content recommendations that we can add to our Holiday Season OPML, please email them to feeds @ viigo . com.

Team Viigo
It’s never too early to start having fun

Frankenstein… Dracula… The Legend of Sleepy Hollow….Yes, it’s that time of year again.  Time to give yourself a daily spook courtesy of DailyLit.

Viigo now showcases a classic line up of the spookiest stories ever written… Available right now in our Entertainment section.

In case you’re not familiar with DailyLit, it’s a free e-Book service that delivers a daily snippet (mobile chapter) of your favorite stories each day in Viigo until the story ends.   You can share snippets with friends (through email, twitter, facebook, etc.) just like you would any other RSS feed.

Adding a Scary Read is easy:

1) From the Viigo home screen, open the Entertainment module then click ‘Add Channel’.

2) Select eBooks by DailyLit, then choose ‘Scary Reads‘.

3) Select as many scary reads as you think you can handle.  Then navigate back to the Entertainment module where they’ll be waiting to spook you.

Team Viigo
Muahahahahahahahaha

It is available today at http://getviigo.com or from any one of our Viigo Partner downloads (e.g. BBGeeks, BerryReview, CrackBerry.com, etc.) and from BlackBerry App World, but please remember to remove any earlier versions of the application in advance of downloading the new one especially if you are switching to/from the App World version for the first time.

Beyond the performance improvements, the latest version allows you to see ALL the RSS feeds you have subscribed across Viigo from within News & RSS module, neatly categorized by heading … all designed to make reading your favorite feeds even easier.

And once a story has been read in any module, they are synchronized across all modules. The example below shows an article read in News in the first image and recognized as read in Sports in the third image.

With the download of the latest version of Viigo, you will also have speedier access to the new and/or enhanced services such as the NFL, NHL and Soccer within the Sports module.

Team Viigo
Sometimes Less Is More

With more than 50 countries to select from, each further categorized to provide regional focus, users of the Local Wine Events service will never miss an opportunity to sample what’s on offer.

Using the current version of Viigo, adding the Local Wine Events service is a quick and easy process.

From the Viigo homepage enter the Local Interest module.

Next, click on “Add Channel”, then Local Wine Events

At this point you can choose the region or regions of interest among the United States, Canada, United Kingdom or International locations (of which there are 46 countries to choose from).

Once you have added the channels, the next time you enter local wine events the feeds will be available for you.

We hope you enjoy Local Wine Events on Viigo!

Team Viigo
Live Well!

It only takes three clicks to access the hockey feed library. 1) from the home screen click on Sports, 2) click on “Add Sports”, 3) click on hockey.

From here you can see all the folders and feeds you have to choose from. By selecting the feeds you will have access to the content once you return to the hockey service. Once the season starts an additional feed for league wide statistics will also be available.

You can also elect to receive team specific information by entering the Team Channels folder. There you can access team scores, schedule and roster. And once the season starts, you will also be able to add team specific statistics.

And, of course, you are also able to select from a number of hockey news sources to be sure you stay on top of all the happenings across the league or as it related to your team.

Kick save and a beauty!

Announcing Viigo News! Available  immediately at www.getviigo.com/news, the application allows you to select from hundreds of popular business, finance, sports, entertainment or headline news directly from the Channel Library so that you can stay current with the world around you. We now also make it possible for you to get the content you love from our Content Partners such as BBGeeks, BerryReview, CrackBerry.com etc. all in one place.

With Viigo News, we’ve also updated the UI to make a few things easier.

You’ll notice the new buttons across the bottom of the Channels screen. Now, you can just click the “Add Channel” button to take you directly to the Channel Library. There, 13 newly organized categories are immediately available to you to select from.

We’ve also made it easier for you to add content not already in our channel library. If you want Viigo to search for feeds associated with a particular web site, for example, from within the Channel library, click on “Add Your Own Channel” then select “Check a website for RSS”

And, the News version of Viigo, of course, allows you to share what you find interesting with your social networks such as Twitter and Facebook.

Viigo News now also supports dedicated WiFi! Those of you who are not on large data plans can update the app for free while you are on WiFi. Check in OPTIONS/Network Settings and select WiFi … for WiFi only connectivity.

Lighter and faster, with Viigo News you’ll always be in the know.

Important Note: If you are installing Viigo News, please remove your current version of Viigo first, and reboot your device. Then once, you’ve installed Viigo News, just sign in with your existing user name and password, and your feeds will re-appear,

Team Viigo
When Just The News Counts

With the London Fashion Week version of Viigo you can access catwalk schedules, designer biographies, photos from the runways, live news reports, the official Twitter streams and more.

The Catwalk Schedule provides a day-by-day event listings with associated designer and the designers biographical information.

The Designers channel features biographical information of each of the designers.

If you are visiting London for the event you will also benefit from having local bar, hotel, restaurant and shop information.

All the breaking news from the event is immediately available to you as well.

Follow London Fashion Week’s official Twitter stream. And, not only can you view a post, you can retweet it, reply to it and reply to all mentioned in the post.

And, of course, what fashion show would be complete without photos? Get the best shots on your BlackBerry smartphone.

On the runway with Viigo.

Get it all … live scores, standings, schedule, breaking news and more.

To follow the EUFA Champions League on Viigo, enter the Sports module and select “Add Sports” and from the list select “Soccer” then “UEFA Champions League”.

At this point you have the option of getting the feeds for league wide schedule, Live Scores, Completed Games Scores and Standings. Further, you can enter the Team Scores & Schedules folder to get team specific information. Once in the folder, select the group your favorite team in is, for instance Group H for Arsenal and then choose the Schedule and/or Live Scores feeds.

Once you have added the feeds, they will be available to you the next time you enter the Sports module. And you can follow your team and the league.

Bend it like Viigo!

A few days ago, the server team informed me that we’d passed the threshold of 1.5BB articles delivered … a stunning number if you think about it. Clearly, Viigo users are voracious consumers of information.

Secondly, we recently surpassed 2MM downloads of the app itself. In fact, the download pace has been increasing rapidly, with the vast majority of downloads having actually occurred in the past 8 months.

Kudos to the team here, and to our many partners … these numbers are the direct result of a lot of hard work from a great group of talented people.

And … thanks to all of you for making Viigo so popular!

Mark Ruddock

CEO
Team Viigo

twitter.com/ruddockmh